Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins co-led the Series D funding for AI marketing startup Profound to expand its applied AI research team. The New York-based company raised $180 million at a $1.8 billion valuation, with participation from Lightspeed, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic Capital, and SPC. The capital supports the creation of an AI benchmark for real-world marketing tasks and post-training models for specialized field workflows.

The funding arrives less than 7 months after the company closed a $96 million Series C round. Profound's AI platform, which services one third of the Fortune 100, provides an "AI Marketer" for data investigation and a "Context Manager" for brand data synthesis. Founders James Cad, a former Uber maps engineer, and D. Babbs launched the startup after meeting at SPC.